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Reflections the Cultural Turn: Fashion Or Progress

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Reflections the Cultural Turn: Fashion Or Progress Antipode 30:4, 1998, pp. 379–394 ISSN 0066-4812 REFLECTIONS THE CULTURAL TURN: FASHION OR PROGRESS IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY? Clive Barnett* THE CULTURALCLIVE WORM BARNETT TURNS The Cultural Turn in Question How does one approach the cultural turn in human geography? Does the phrase “the cultural turn” imply a far too coherent and singular process, a misnaming of what is in fact a diverse array of intellectual projects? After all, according to Matless (1995:395), “[t]he cultural in geography becomes ever harder to delimit.” If “the cultural” has become so hard to clearly delineate, does it really make any sense to talk of “the” cultural turn? Recent debates have been characterised by accusations and counter- accusations of misrepresentation that might well suggest that the field is not easily reduced to simple positions (e.g., Price and Lewis, 1993; Cos- grove, 1993, 1996; Duncan, 1993; Jackson, 1993, 1996; Mitchell, 1995; Dun- can and Duncan, 1996). Increasingly, it seems, there is a tendency among those closely associated with the “new” cultural geography to eschew the use of the phrase “cultural turn,” just at the moment it begins to take on a certain solidity within the discipline. I do not claim to have a complete grasp on the range of work touched by the cultural turn, but neither do I think that the complexity of this work disables any and all attempts to subject it, whatever “it” is, to criti- cal scrutiny. And there are ways of establishing the real dimensions of the cultural turn as an intellectual event. Consider, for example, analyses of citation patterns in human geography. These studies clearly indicate a marked shift during the 1980s away from spatial analysis and toward *Department of Geography, The University of Reading, Reading, England; e-mail: c.barnett@ geog1.reading.ac.uk © 1998 Editorial Board of Antipode Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK. Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved. 380 CLIVE BARNETT political economy perspectives (Bodman, 1991). There now seems to exist a dominant research cohort consisting of a highly integrated “Society and Space” grouping, made up of a number of “blocs” representing several established systematic specialties, such as industrial geography or urban geography. Of most interest is that the early 1990s saw the clear emer- gence of a new set of “master weavers” who are closely identified with the cultural turn, such as Peter Jackson, Denis Cosgrove, Trevor Barnes, James Duncan, and Jacqueline Burgess (Bodman, 1997:10). Bodman goes so far as to argue that this development “provides clear evidence of a restructuring of the intellectual space of human geography. Traditional cultural geography has been supplanted and the new cultural geography has been created close to the centre of the [Society and Space] network” (Bodman, 1995:52). Extensive exercises in citation counting seem to pro- vide a certain degree of “objective” evidence that the cultural turn has very rapidly secured a central position in the higher echelons of human geography’s research elite. From a far more anecdotal perspective, the impact of these develop- ments is registered in the newly acquired public visibility of geography, typified by newspaper commentaries that amuse themselves by contrast- ing geography’s staid old image with its newly discovered sexiness: “The Death of the Anorak”(The Observer, 17 April 1994); “Space Cadets Get Post-Modern Stress” (The Observer, 2 July 1995). Interestingly, such jour- nalistic commentaries often fail to distinguish between professional geog- raphers and other academics and intellectuals. From the perspective of these sorts of stories, geography and a wider field of cultural studies are becoming indistinguishable. The cultural turn has many manifestations. Even as a summary, the following list is hardly exhaustive: a revivification of traditional areas of interest in cultural geography under the influence of new theoretical ideas; the “textualisation” of subfields such as political geography; the revival of interest in the historiography of geography under the influence of theories of colonial discourse and postcolonialism; a concern for the “cultural” embeddedness of economic processes; an interest in examining the mobili- sation of culture as an accumulation strategy; a greater concern for exam- ining relations between identity and consumption; an ever-greater sophistication in understandings of the construction of social relations of gender and race as well as class; a focus upon cultural constructions of environment and nature. Perhaps one common thread connecting these and other myriad projects is a commitment to epistemologies, often loosely labelled “poststructural,” that emphasise the contingency of knowledge claims and recognise the close relationship among language, power, and knowledge. Both epistemologically and in the construction of new empiri- cal research objects, the cultural turn is probably best characterised by a heightened reflexivity toward the role of language, meaning, and represen- tations in the constitution of “reality” and knowledge of reality. Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved. THE CULTURAL WORM TURNS 381 If one wanted to date the moment of the cultural turn or the emergence of a “new” cultural geography, then one would look no further than the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is in this period that one sees the proliferation of programmatic and theoretical statements on the “new” cultural geogra- phy (e.g., Cosgrove and Jackson, 1987; Duncan and Duncan, 1988; Daniels, 1989; Jackson, 1989), of special issues of journals devoted to themes such as “Culture’s Geographies”(Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6[2]), and of new substantive empirical work (e.g., Daniels and Cosgrove, 1988; Duncan, 1990; Barnes and Duncan, 1992). All of these developments have been backed up by conferences and institutional developments, such as the Institute of British Geographers Social and Cultural Geography Group’s “initiative” on “de-limiting human geography” (Philo et al., 1991). In perusing the benchmark texts and articles, what rapidly becomes clear is the extent to which the cultural turn has involved a major reorien- tation of human geography toward new disciplinary interlocutors (Greg- ory, 1994:5). The cultural turn needs, then, to be located within the wider set of debates that emerged in the late 1980s around postmodernism, which in large part were the vehicles for geography’s entry into new fields of cultural theory. And this connection also points toward the close rela- tionship that exists between the emergence of new forms of cultural analy- sis in human geography and a growing disaffection with the particular form of geography’s Marxism that had acquired theoretical hegemony in geography in the 1970s and 1980s. Of course, the embracing term “cultural turn” hides some significant differences within and between particular fields. McDowell (1994) prefers to talk of new cultural geographies, loosely distinguishing between a “cul- tural materialism” strand and a “new landscape school.” Peter Jackson (1993:519) distinguishes among the work of the three writers who seem to have become most closely identified with the new cultural geography, in emphasising the differences among “Cosgrove’s landscape iconography, Duncan’s literary post-structuralism, and my own brand of ‘cultural poli- tics.’” As well as differences in favoured objects of research and theoretical influences, there is also a geography to the cultural turn. It is common- place to distinguish broadly between a North American strand with important lines of continuity to an existing subdiscipline of cultural geog- raphy as well as to humanistic geography and a British scene where cul- tural geography’s “newness” is more obvious and where its development is closely related to the reshaping of social geography. There are also significant connections with work in Australia and New Zealand (e.g., Anderson and Gale, 1992), and all of this work is in turn being picked up elsewhere (e.g., Badenhorst, 1992). The “new” cultural geography and “the cultural turn” are, then, international developments. Whatever the problems in pinning the cultural turn down in precise intellectual terms, it is clear that something has happened to human geography recently and that this something is related to the ascendancy of cultural theory not just Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved. 382 CLIVE BARNETT in human geography but also as the glue for a series of overlapping inter- disciplinary projects. In what follows, by trying to establish the theoretical significance of the conditions for the contemporary circulation of cultural theory, I want to identify one particular issue upon which the implications of the cultural turn might be opened up to critical judgement. The starting point for the argument of this paper is that the production of new research in human geography under the broad umbrella of the cultural turn has been in no small part dependent upon the transmission of knowledge from other disciplinary fields. In itself, this is not peculiar to recent developments. The interdisciplinarity represented by “the cultural turn” does, however, rely on particular means of knowledge transmission. In what follows, I shall focus upon the relationship between human geography and cultural studies, a field that has exerted such a powerful attraction to geographers since the 1980s, and on how this relationship has been mediated in large
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